After Dave was released from his suicide watch I took him four mailbags full of cards from our listeners wishing him well and sending him love. Dave looked me in the eyes and said “I heard what you did for me. Thank you.” He hugged me tight before I left.
I remain good friends with Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andy Fletcher and see them at virtually every Depeche Mode show. They send me Christmas cards every year.
LOSING MY RELIGION
Ask any KROQ kid who grew up with the station from its early days in Pasadena and they’ll tell you that the nineties were a time of change for 106.7.
Gone was the unpredictable, loose and crazy element that had come across so clearly on the air and it was replaced by a smoother, more corporate approach. The music changed too. The fun feel that new wave had ushered in was replaced by the doom and gloom of grunge. No one knows exactly when the eighties began; was it with The Ramones at the CBGBs, the Sex Pistols swearing on live TV or Duran Duran running through the jungles of Sri Lanka? But we all know the moment when the eighties ended. It was the day Kurt Cobain picked up his guitar and lit into the opening riff of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’
In 1991 I was doing middays at KROQ. Andy Schuon had been appointed program director and Lewis Largent, as his music director, was using his talented ear to find and add grunge to the playlist as quickly as it came across his desk. For them the Seattle sound was what was happening and the eighties music that had built KROQ had become a lead weight pulling it down. As almost a joke they decided that for the Memorial Day weekend they would program three days of nothing but eighties music and then possibly use that as an excuse to remove it entirely from the rotation at the station and start with a clean slate. However sometimes things don’t go quite as planned.
The listeners’ reaction to the eighties weekend was very different to what was expected. Instead of the previous decade’s music coming across on the radio as being ‘old’ and ‘burned out’ the station was bombarded with overwhelmingly positive phone calls about how much they loved hearing it and asking when we were going to do the next one. Andy and Lewis were a little shocked at the response and asked if I could meet with them about the feedback. They both viewed me as Mr. 80s which coming from them in the spirit they meant it was a bit of a put-down but I didn’t care; I’d survived much worse insults.
We sat down behind closed doors in Andy’s corner office and the gist of the meeting was that the station needed to use this listener outpouring as an opportunity to create somewhere to put (I got the impression they meant “dump”) all these eighties bands. Andy and I might have very different tastes in music, but he has one of the best minds for promotions that I’ve ever encountered or worked with and as we talked an idea was developed.
KROQ already had a noticeable bump in the ratings during my show around noon when people were off for their lunch break so why not play all the eighties music there for the maximum number of people to hear? That way they could get the majority of it off of the regular playlist while still letting the loyal listeners know that KROQ had not entirely lost touch with its roots.
The only problem was coming up with a catchy name, and one that separated KROQ from all those “oldies” that would be played. That was the last thing the programming department at the station wanted at the time, to be associated with the past and the eighties. I thought the solution was obvious and I was happy to be identified with the decade that had given me so much. On that day, in Andy’s office, Richard Blade’s Flashback Lunch was born.
Though the rest of the air-staff initially thought of the show as a short-lived novelty feature I refused to see it that way. To me it was insane that the station was dismissing its own heritage as disposable and wanted to turn away from the very music that had made us great. These were bands that were forever associated with KROQ and we were willing to throw that legacy away? As far as I was concerned that wasn’t going to happen. Even if everybody else at KROQ viewed Richard Blade’s Flashback Lunch as a place the eighties went to die, for me it was a chance to showcase how unique that music really was and how it could hold its own against any of the grunge that was being released.
I decided I would give it my all and try to make it the most vibrant, exciting show on the dial, and rather than mock the songs and the bands, I would treat them as if they were as important today as when we first discovered them.
I worked on a number of ideas to enhance the show, to make it stand out from the rest of the day’s programming; I contacted all the artists and groups directly and had them cut IDs and promos for me and every day I featured interviews, both live and recorded, tour information, birthdays, anniversaries of important releases and any new music they were putting out. Suddenly I was not the only one excited about this; the feedback from the bands was immediate. They were thrilled to have a place on the radio dial where they were still played and respected and during the first week of my show’s debut we had Howard Jones, Dave Wakeling of The English Beat and Boy George in studio plus phone calls from Depeche Mode and Bernard Sumner of New Order.
Instead of the Flashback Lunch being a graveyard for eighties music it became a celebration of the previous decade and people tuned in in droves.
It was an instant hit and now KROQ had three huge ratings winners in three distinct time slots; Kevin and Bean every morning, Richard Blade’s Flashback Lunch in the middle of the day and Loveline every night. It was a salesperson’s dream come true and soon we not only had sold-out commercial sets booked months ahead but sponsors squeezed in at the open and close of the show.
Ironically none of the three highest rated programs on KROQ were about nineties music; Kevin and Bean were a fun, raucous morning show which was mostly talk and humor, Loveline featured teenage sexual problems, while on the Flashback Lunch I took everyone back to the days of Aqua Net and Kajagoogoo.
Richard Blade’s Flashback Lunch continued to grow in popularity and within months was the number-one show in its timeslot in many of our key demos. Andy added a weekend version of it to the KROQ lineup, Richard Blade’s Flashback Sundays which lead into Rodney Bingenheimer’s Sunday night show. I loved seeing Rodney every week as I had nothing but respect and admiration for him.
Rodney is a legendary DJ in the music world and had been responsible for breaking so many groups and artists on his radio show from the Go-Gos in 1981 through to Oasis in 1992. He loved music and his reputation for being able to find new, upcoming artists was unmatched. I felt that the two of us, back-to-back on a Sunday night, made a great combination and it gave the listeners tuning in as their weekend came to a close a comforting glimpse back to the KROQ they had grown up with.
Word started to appear in the trade publications such as Radio & Records, Hits and Billboard that all across America radio stations were launching their own version of Richard Blade’s Flashback Lunch. The name was different of course, “the Retro Lunch Bag” or “the Midday Time Machine” but they were direct copies of what we had started. Andy and I both regretted not trademarking that particular radio format and then syndicating it as it quickly spread to more than 400 stations coast-to-coast.
The impact that the Flashback Lunch was having was quickly noticed by the record companies and I was contacted by Carl Caprioglio in 1993 to put out an album on Oglio Records through Sony/EMI called Richard Blade’s Flashback Favorites. It was to be a one-off project released locally and that was okay with me.
Richard Blade’s Flashback Favorites series Volumes 1 – 6
Over the next three months I compiled a list of artists and rare tracks to put on the CD and cassette and set to work on the liner notes. When it was released it went straight to the top of the best seller list throughout LA and Orange County. After seeing it hit #1 Sony and EMI immediately changed their marketing strategy and Oglio Records re-released the album on a national level. Within just weeks it had sold more than a hundred thousand copies!
We signed a new deal and five more Richard Blade Flashback Favorites albums f
ollowed to complete the series. It always makes me smile when I walk into a club or visit another radio station and see that they have all six of my albums. And from that first release onwards, at every gig I play someone inevitably comes up with one of those CDs for me to sign.
KROQ continued to soar and with Andy Schuon’s guidance responsible for keeping us in the top five in the ratings and generating huge sales revenue for the station he quite rightly became very much in demand and within a few months was lured away from radio to head up MTV in New York. Andy knew he would need a great music director for MTV so he took Lewis with him plus a former intern and part-timer from KROQ, Kennedy, to appear on camera. A new program director was needed and quickly. Thankfully the spotlight fell on exactly the right person to lead KROQ through the coming years, Kevin Weatherly.
I’ve been blessed to work with some incredible talents over the years in radio, TV and film; Ramondo, Mark Driscoll, Sarah Jessica Parker, Larry Groves, Greg Kinnear, Jimmy Kimmel and the creator of KROQ, Rick Carroll, and I have to add to that list, Kevin Weatherly. I think Kevin is the rightful heir to KROQ that Rick himself would have anointed had he lived.
Unlike most new program directors, Kevin didn’t come in thinking he knew everything and acting like an axe man cutting the existing staff and replacing them with his own people for no good reason. Instead he arrived at the station wanting to learn, to absorb what KROQ was and what made it great before making changes. Kevin learned what Morrissey, Depeche Mode and New Order meant to KROQ and to our listeners even as he tried to work out where they would fit in with the influx of groups like Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden.
Having said that I felt that Kevin didn’t ‘get me’ personally. I don’t think he ever understood why the eighties remained so popular and why people tuned into my show in such numbers. I think his focus was to push KROQ forward into the future, embrace the new music and trends in rock and keep the station cutting-edge. That is a very understandable position for a hip radio programmer but it did ignore the fact of the station’s inescapable heritage and the impact it had on millions of kids who had grown up with it during the previous decade and viewed KROQ as almost a beloved family member who was there for them during the good times and the bad. To those “KROQ kids” we were the friend they could turn to, to rely on, when no one else “got them.” Around the world, but especially in Southern California, it could never be forgotten that the eighties were a unique time in music and KROQ had been its number-one champion.
Initially dismissed as disposable pop, virtually everyone, myself included, thought at the time that the songs would have no shelf life. Only one person knew better, Rick Carroll. He said to me as far back as 1985, “Richard, one day they’ll be stations everywhere playing nothing but KROQ music.”
I thought he was nuts, but as usual as in all matters of music, Rick was 100% right.
Kevin was always really civil to me and no one could ask for a more loyal boss but still, the vibe I picked up was that I was like a distinguishing facial birthmark and that as much as you’d like to cut it off and get rid of it you just can’t because everyone would notice it was gone. I was the one keeping the eighties alive on KROQ and pulling huge ratings doing it. But every day when I came in to do my show there was a feeling in the air that I was, ironically, a square peg that no longer fit into KROQ’s round hole. After all those years and all that work I now felt uncomfortable in the place that had become my home, my KROQ.
KROQ had been my church, my religion, for so many years but now with the foundation gone it was crumbling down around me. But surprisingly at this point in time it didn’t bother me. My father’s death had shown me life is fleeting and not to be concerned with petty matters and with that knowledge burning inside I knew I had already glimpsed my future on that reef in Grand Cayman and it was not KROQ.
I was tempted to leave in 1995 and just head into the sunset but I was very aware that if I did that then eighties music on KROQ would depart with me and that would start an inevitable snowball effect across radio in America and all those great artists and their music would be lost, perhaps forever. That would be a tragedy.
For young kids getting into music in the nineties I felt they had to hear Joy Division, Siouxsie, Gen X, the Specials and so many others to really appreciate how modern music had evolved. KROQ without the eighties would become a wasteland. It would have been like a regular rock station ignoring The Beatles, The Who, The Stones or Zep. It would just be wrong.
The irony was that I was actually a huge fan of a different kind of music that was emerging at the same time as grunge; electronic dance music.
I loved 808 State, Basement Jaxx, the Chemical Brothers, Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, Crystal Method, Snap! and Moby. I pushed hard to get their music on KROQ but was told there was no place for it.
I would find instrumental tracks from those acts and many others and use them as talkover beds on the Flashback Lunch just to give them some kind of exposure on the radio, and every day throughout the nineties I would close my show with Orbital and their song ‘Halcyon’ (which I loved so much I also used as a chapter title in this book.)
I took Front 242’s “Headhunter” to our production director, John Frost, and suggested making a KROQ jingle from it. John, who is beyond brilliant at what he does, conjured up something that surpassed all of my expectations and a classic KROQ ID was born mixing the break from ‘Headhunter’ into a chant crying out for “forty minutes, forty minutes, forty minutes of non-stop K –Rock.” I still think that to this day that it is one of the best radio jingles ever produced.
For all the unspoken tension that might have existed between us I found Kevin to be a great person and phenomenal at finding the next great act in rock music. There could have been no one better than “KW” as we called him to helm KROQ. And through all my time with Kevin we only had one major run-in and that was during the fallout from a tragic Friday night in 1996.
DEATH OF A DISCO DANCER
Even with my radio shows and TV gigs I still made time to play in the clubs. Those early days driving back and forth across Europe and building my own mobile disco consoles have never left me. If you were to scratch the surface off this radio personality you would find a club DJ waiting to get behind the turntables.
One of my all-time favorite places to spin anywhere on the planet is The Palace in Hollywood. Located across from Capitol records, the home of The Beatles, Beach Boys and Duran Duran, and just yards from the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, it was a legendary nightclub and it had certainly earned its status.
The Palace has a history stretching back to 1927 and had been home to iconic performers who held court there with long-running shows, both live and on television, including Jerry Lewis, Bing Crosby, Lawrence Welk, Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra. America’s most influential punk group, The Ramones, chose The Palace to be the location of their final show and its Art Noveau architecture both inside and out has been featured in many movies. I was continually in awe of the fact that I was given the opportunity to play at the same venue as those superstars. But even with all those amazing talents that walked that hallowed stage at The Palace, I had the privilege to hold the record for longest residency of them all.
From 1991 onwards The Palace was mine every Friday night. And even though I would play music for the packed crowds and then go onstage to entertain the audience much like the legends who had preceded me over the decades before, that night I had something happen at my show that none of those phenomenal acts ever experienced; I had a fan die in my arms.
The Palace had become a much-needed source of comfort and support for me over the past couple of years because in January of 1993 I had come home from my radio show to an empty house. My wife was gone.
At first there was nothing to suggest there was anything unusual. No note, no angry phone call. Normally I would have assumed that Karen was just out shopping or picking up groceries. But something didn’t seem right. Even little Angel felt the diffe
rent vibe and looked at me as if things were amiss.
I searched our bedroom and saw that a few of her clothes were gone along with a suitcase. I was starting to panic. For some reason she had just left.
I looked all around the house and in my little office I noticed that my checkbook and papers weren’t in their usual place. Plus they weren’t in order; they had been gone through. Then in the trash in the spare room I found a receipt dated that morning, from a copy shop just a few blocks away on Ventura Boulevard. Had someone made copies of all our bank accounts or was I just being paranoid? My world felt like it was spinning out of control and my breathing became shallow and rapid, I could barely think because of a pounding deep inside my skull and it seemed like my head would explode.
Karen and I had a good marriage. We rarely, if ever, argued. We travelled together extensively and always had a good time. And from the day I said those two words, “I do,” I had put my cheating ways aside and not even looked twice at another woman. I took my vows seriously. But now she had for some reason walked out.
I racked my brain as to why. A few days before we’d had an in-depth talk about her career. She was about to hit thirty on February 14, a Valentine’s Day baby, and as an actress in age-sensitive Hollywood that was an unwelcome milestone. It was becoming tougher for her now to land parts because her competition was the hottest new eighteen-year-olds in the country just off the bus to Tinsel Town. But she had proved time and time again that she was up to the task, with terrific guest star roles in huge shows such as Seinfeld and starring in a just-released movie, Dangerous Curves.
World in My Eyes: The Autobiography Page 44
